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game crit https://birthbydrip.neocities.org/ https://youtube.com/@regenpodcast

first paragraph from review: Where Kururin Paradise poured the scrappy look of the original Kuru Kuru Kururin into a sleeker, cheerier skin, Kururin Squash completely revamps the look and feel with lush 3D backgrounds and and a focus on gentler curves. The flat-shaded cartoon interludes of Paradise give way to a puppet show aesthetic, down to curtains that open on the title card and characters printed on cardboard with articulated, flapping arms. Their non-stop gesticulating combined with the movement of the backgrounds, replete with signs of organic life and community, infuses the atmosphere with an invitation for the player to live in its world. Kururin had never been a brooding or violent series, but the grinning brutality of the obstacle gauntlets finally melts away in Squash.
A Katamari-like from the actual Katamari developers, those Now Production contractors who toiled to get Keita Takahashi’s vision off the ground.1 Munchables twists the “roll up stuff, get bigger, roll up bigger stuff” loop from Katamari into a game all about eating, where the mute, spherical protagonists chomp through waves of pirate/alien/frankenfood creations, progressively inflating after each set of meals. The character’s size is unambiguously labeled with a level number, with enemies larger than yourself having a similar label to illustrate who exactly you can eat at any given point. These larger enemies can be bumped with a dash attack that splits them into smaller enemies, although if the difference between you and the enemy is vast enough, each of their component sub-enemies may still be larger than you. Recursively repeating the split mechanic unveils levels built around flooding the field with bite-sized enemies and eating as many as possible before they reassemble into their larger forms.
first paragraph of link below: The Helirin’s rotation in the Kururin games has a particular dynamic: certain rotation angles will always reoccur provided the player has space to sit and wait. Safe zones often bookend major obstacle sections, so a start-and-stop tendency arises, where arriving in a safe zone with the wrong angle to start the next section incurs a short break to let it spin into place. The first Kururin game suffered from this in its larger stages specifically thanks to cyclical obstacles, each requiring a synchronization between the Helirin and the obstacle. Depending on the difference in frequency between the two cycles, waiting for both to line up could potentially take multiple rotations without prior planning. While the series’s staple springs, which change the Helirin’s direction of rotation, could help by altering the phase over multiple bounces, most applications of these boiled down to bouncing between parallel springs, offering only minor improvements over unassisted waiting. Kururin Paradise smartly fixes this by giving the player control over their rotation speed. Even with only a single speed increase to work with, the player has significantly more leverage on how to synchronize with obstacles or avoid waiting. In turn, the designers decrease the amount of safe zones in each level, resulting in more compact and intense design overall.
first paragraph of the link below: Retrospectively speaking, Ace Combat’s1 rough-hewn edges might appeal to those turned off by how quickly the series streamlined starting with its immediate sequel. Starting Ace Combat’s hard mode plops the player into an unmaneuverable tin can that explodes upon contact with a single missile, and the plane selection only incrementally improves its quality from there. Broadly speaking, the most useful planes are split between durable hunks of junk and fragile ships that pivot on a dime, leaving the player to decide between the least bad choice for a given objective. Both of these give the simplistic dogfights and bombing runs a distinct flavor. The former makes downhill approaches a necessity to build up enough speed when avoiding surface-to-air missiles surrounding a drop zone, while the latter turns stray gunfire into a legitimate danger. The decisions here (along with a bevy of stealth planes and other more unorthodox choices) make experimentation with each mission much more useful compared to later titles, which drown the player in extremely useful all-rounders.
The fundamental genius of the Kururin trilogy derives from its unique, bare-bones approach to modulating outcomes over time. Consider racing games: part of their appeal is how the timing of an action alters the outcome of each action that comes after it. Taking a turn changes not only the car’s current speed and direction but the speed at which it arrives at the next turn as well. This propagates to the requisite braking power needed for the turn, the best line to take through the curve, and the torque and power the engine is putting out; each variation adds nuance to later actions. Even when the system is abstractly solvable, the variables are so granular and dynamics so nonlinear that reproducing the solution is never trivial. The Kururin series does this without the same density or non-linearity by instead constantly turning Kururin’s long, stick-like ship while punishing contact with any obstacles. The player tracks little other the rotation of the ship and the location of moving obstacles, yet small variations in timing change the phase of the ship’s rotation for future movement, restricting viable movement through future corridors. While this lacks the analog granularity of car control, Kururin’s ticky-tacky movement and three discrete speed settings make up for it by clamping the player’s precision, asking them to alternate between the separate speed modes rather than key in a specific analog value. This reconstitutes the subtle variations of each run that racing games exhibit, elevating Kururin to their level in the confines of a handheld d-pad.
disassembled gamecube running cubeboot on a flatscreen
Right off the bat we’re in trouble: "I don’t like Mixtape (Beethoven and Dinosaur, 2026). I am going to be a hater in this review. If that’s not something you’re looking for, I have good news! Quite a few other critics adored this game. IGN’s Simon Cardy gave it a 10/10. Game Informer’s Charles Harte gave it a 9. … I have made it clear on-record in the past that I do not fuck with Beethoven and Dinosaur’s output. I thought The Artful Escape sucked on toast. … It turns out that Beethoven and Dinosaur are even more predictable than I held out hope for and they deserved to be put in a box the entire fucking time." This is full-on Gawker-style “voicey” writing that’s been stale for years.
header and first paragraph: "Although the package is unassuming and generic, Skydiving Extreme is actually a hidden fourth Bust-a-Groove entry, using a similar QTE combat concept without the rhythm component.1 The latter absence fundamentally alters the flow of each match: without synchronized measures tying the players together, the race is on to mash the button commands as quickly as possible. Dance battles from Bust-a-Groove transform here into skydiving choreography, with each team of four leaping from a plane and forming what are effectively body sculptures of progressive complexity. Presumably these formations also increase drag, as incorrectly executing them will put the divers in free fall, with the team that reaches the break altitude first losing. Over the course of a clear, the player earns the right to take on more and more complex maneuvers, performing in thunderstorms and other dangerous locations."
front matter and first paragraph of link below
first paragraph of the text review given in the link below "Atlus adapts the grisly world of surgery as a timer juggling exercise, with the player managing a main time limit, the drain on their patient's vitals, and the interval until a new hazard spawns. Kyriaki, one of the game's fabricated "GUILT" viruses, best exemplifies this. It appears by creating an incision in the patient's tissue, which bleeds and thus increases the patient's vital drain, and it travels under the tissue surface making more incisions until extracted. Locating one permanently requires detecting it with an ultrasound and then cutting it out of the tissue with the scalpel, after which it will make yet another incision, leaving two net additional cuts to deal with. To kill it, you target it with a laser for a period, with the caveat that leaving the laser in one place for too long will burn through the tissue and cause a hemorrhage. When multiple of these appear at once, you're put in the uncomfortable circumstance of switching your attention between actively adversarial viruses and the injuries both you and they incur. This aligns with the game's spatial aspect: your tools utilize stylus strokes, so the player can optionally bide their time fixing injuries while waiting for multiple Kyriaki to line up for extraction in a single strike. Attempting this without consideration of the patient's vitals often results in a quick death, however, especially in scenarios where killing one on its own leads to two more spawning and overwhelming the organ with incisions. While this sounds like a traditional combat game, the implementation is a stranger blend: small skill-based actions, almost reminiscent of the exaggerated tasks of the *Cooking Mama* games, required dynamically based on the behavior of the virus."
“Loves Takes Miles” was worked as a part of a “narrative campaign” by Chaotic Good Projects. A “narrative campaign” is one of four kinds of services the agency offers — the others being “UGC” (which stands for user-generated content), “Fanpage,” and “Brands and Media.” According to the agency’s website, they also worked narrative and UGC campaigns for Geese’s record “Getting Killed.” When I discovered that the same media apparatus propping up Sombr and Alex Warren (the term propping up here is used intentionally — to me, there is almost nothing compelling about these artists aside from their aggressive social campaign) was also boosting Cameron Winter and Geese, I was shocked. I thought this was the kind of thing that was only deployed in service of mass-market, commercial pop — secretly, also, that this was the only kind of music such marketing would work for.
screenshot of first two paragraphs and header from the link below